After a bit more work, toolbars (and other places ;=) have icons, too. More Kate plugins do work, like the nice project plugin I use the whole day, see:

Updated .dmg files can be found at (alpha quality, only tested on Mac OS 10.10):

ftp://kate-editor.org/cullmann/kate-20151024.dmg

ftp://kate-editor.org/cullmann/kwrite-20151024.dmg

Help to get more stuff working and fix the remaining crashs is highly appreciated. A script how to build that all can be found at:

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kate.git&a=blob&f=mac.txt

You can use a plain Qt and current KDE Frameworks & Kate master to get that running. Guess the next goal would be to get KIO working without patching Qt, lets see how much work that is.

P.S. With the guide in mac.txt you should be able to try out how to port other KDE based applications, too, and get a application bundle, as most stuff should be available now, for the average application. How to use some bundled Breeze icon set can be found here, just call code like that after QApplication is constructed:

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kate.git&a=blob&f=icons.h

Where to put the Breeze resource see mac.txt (its actually toplevel in the <app>.app folder, not in Resources like told by Qt docs).

But as you can see, we have no icons, but that is as no work was invested into it and not even any icons are installed ;=)

I will maintain a guide how to build it on mac in the kate.git/mac.txt file. At the moment, this is all not that nice. Kate is able to open files via file dialog and it renders OK, modulo some glitches.

Still a long way to go, ATM the application bundle contains just the application binary + plist + icons. The libraries are still found only because of they are were they were compiled & installed. Plugins are not found either, need to take a look if that is just missing env vars or more.

At least, this is far better than at the beginning of the year, were all I had was instant segfaults.

Kate runs here btw. without any dbus server running, which means file opening in that window via command line won’t work, but still, compared to KWrite, which crashs on open dialog because of dbus missing, that is nice ;=)

After some hacking on frameworks, I have the first running KWrite version on Mac that uses an unpatched Qt from the qt.io offline installer:
It is still ugly, as scaled on my HiDPI display as the plist file is missing and it crashs on everything (aka open dialog) and has no icons.

Script that did the job (still some patches to frameworks missing in master that remove optional deps and fixes linking), it is available in updated form in kate.git:

https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kate.git&a=blob&f=mac.txt

The changes will benefit Windows builds, too, as they made the dependencies a bit smaller. You for example need no longer phonon to get this running, nor do you need to hassle around with the xslt/xml doctools on Windows.